It was an amazing performance. Mr. Khrushchev's press conference was probably the biggest and the most unpleasant that the world has ever seen.

It opened with prolonged booing from most of the 2,000 journalists present, and went on for two and a half hours. Battle raged through the sweaty afternoon in the Salle des Pas Perdus of the Palais de Chaillot, a triumph in its way for the brutal and indefatigable spontaneity of Mr. Khrushchev's methods, and a rather shameful day in the history of international affairs.

Mr. Khrushchev's performance bore no relation whatsoever to what goes by the name of diplomacy in the West - or indeed to human behaviour since the days when warriors taunted their enemies into battle by bawling insults at them from the top of the ramparts.

The press - which normally falls over backwards to be respectful even to the seediest statesmen - took its cue from him, and shouted back.

In a way, the honours of this gutter-battle went to that skilled old Ukrainian fishwife on the platform. Only once did he really lose his temper - when he described those who had booed him as German riff-raff and sent specially by Mr. Adenauer, imperialist lackeys who should have been killed when they invaded Russia during the last war.

Then his gold teeth flashed in the arc lights, and the pudgy right hand pounded the table and lacerated the air. His neck grew redder and redder as he shouted above the increasing roar of protests.

He drew the familiar homely analogies from his youth. His mother, he said, could only afford to buy cream rarely. Sometimes the cat would steal it, and his mother would take the cat by the scruff of its neck, shake it, and rub its nose in the cream.

Should they give the Americans a shaking to teach them aggression was wrong? In the Donbas, when they caught a cat in the pigeon loft, they would pick it up and bang its head against the wall. He advocated similar treatment for the Americans, caught red-handed in Soviet air space.

Two hours after the press conference had started, the power supply failed. Mr. Khrushchev shouted on into the enormous hall without a microphone, drowning the jeers of the correspondents with a joke about the shortcomings of technology.

[He] wound up with another jaunty joke about reaching the end of his interpreters' working day. As [his] car disappeared beneath the Eiffel Tower on the way back to the Soviet Embassy, and the tide of journalists came out of the Salle des Pas Perdus, the world looked a slightly nastier place.